Faced with the reality that its budget isn't big enough for the programs it …

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Last October, NASA received a committee report that called existing planning "unsustainable." The agency couldn't even budget the money to deorbit the International Space Station as planned in 2016—itself a waste of the construction costs—and the vehicles needed for its planned return to the moon wouldn't be ready by the 2030s... "if ever," in the committee's words. So today, NASA administrator Charles Bolden announced a new five-year budget plan that significantly changes the nation's spaceflight priorities.

A completely revamped human program

The biggest decision in the new budget is the end of the Constellation program, which included the Orion crew vehicle and Ares launch vehicles, which merged the Apollo approach to orbit with technology developed for the shuttle. At current budget levels, the full development of these systems would take us well into the 2020s even if completed on schedule, and arrive after the planned appearance of private-sector equivalents. Political opposition to this decision, which will mean the loss of jobs in a number of states, is already present, and many questions in the press conference that accompanied the announcement focused on this issue.

NASA staff members defended the decision when questioned about the development money already spent. "The fact that we poured $9 billion into an unexecutable program does not mean that we should pour another $50 billion after it," said one, "that's what i'd tell taxpayers." Another argued that this did not mean a fundamental change for NASA, saying "We're not canceling our commitment to explore space; we're canceling Constellation."

Part of that commitment will involve a reprieve for the International Space Station. Instead of being deorbited in the middle of this decade, the ISS will be treated like a national laboratory, and used to pursue research on materials and long-term human habitation in space through at least 2020, with additional construction, including new infrastructure, planned beyond the end of the shuttle program. The budget also includes money for an extension of the shuttle through 2011, which will allow for the inevitable launch delays in its remaining five missions.

The remaining construction, crew exchange, and servicing will be provided by both international partners and private companies if all goes as planned. The NASA administrators argue that this doesn't represent a radical departure, as both the agency and military largely rely on commercial launch vehicles for getting hardware into space. The only change is that we may now be relying on them for manned missions, although a few companies are already in work on manned launches. $50 million in stimulus money is already allocated to private companies to support development work, and NASA appears to be considering contests like the X-Prize.

With the new vision, NASA will shift focus to the R&D that will be needed to create a sustainable human exploration program. Over the next five years, a total of roughly $14 billion will be spent on three main programs. More than half of this amount will go to the development of technology for cheaper, extended-range space flight. This includes in-orbit fuel depots, closed-loop life support systems, and automated rendezvous and docking technology. The goal here is clearly to develop the ability to assemble a platform for long-range human space travel from multiple unmanned launch vehicles.

Another $3 billion will go towards the development of heavy-lift engines and propellants. As of the previous plan, development of heavy lift vehicles didn't get any money until 2016, so this is being presented as an acceleration of this capability. Finally, NASA will begin to develop what they term "robotic precursor missions," starting with a robotic, teleoperated Moon rover. The ultimate goal is to develop a robotic resource processing capability designed for the Moon and asteroids. If the equipment is launched successfully, it will begin prepositioning supplies that can be used by any manned follow-on missions.

Another planned expenditure that may ultimately lower launch costs will be a major overhaul of the Kennedy Space Center. The modernization, funded to the tune of $2 billion is intended to improve the efficiency of both manned and unmanned launches.

Business as usual for unmanned work

Although the manned program has been in turmoil, NASA's unmanned programs have been very successful, so it's no surprise that there were no surprises there. NASA will work with the DOE to restart plutonium production for use in power long-distance unmanned vehicles. Money is in place to to launch the Mars Science Laboratory rover in the fall of 2011, and they have the funds to give the James Webb Space Telescope a 70 percent chance of launching in 2014. The Juno probe, which will orbit Jupiter, is also on track.

The big news for near-Earth missions is that NASA will try again with the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, which will provide fine-grained monitoring of carbon fluxes from space, allowing us to monitor sources and sinks of greenhouse gasses. The first OCO failed to reach orbit, and nothing else of the same caliber is planned by any other space agency, so the decision to build a second and "refly" it, in NASA parlance, is very good news for geoscience.

The OCO will be joined by Glory, which will track aerosols and black soot (items that can alter the climate, but are poorly monitored) and two other environmental monitoring satellites. These will join 15 Earth-observing systems currently in orbit. As per existing policy, all the data obtained by these systems will be made available to any government or private organization that wishes to use them.

Programs for the identification of near earth objects, which could obviate all worries about climate change were they to become on-Earth objects, will receive another $16 million a year.

The big picture

Since the dawn of the space age, NASA has been the only way for a human to get to space from within the US. Its problems with the shuttle and work on the ISS have forced it to rely on international partners for manned launch capabilities in recent years, and the Constellation program wouldn't have been ready to supplement Russian launches for several years, even in the most optimistic plans. Despite all that, the new strategy represents an enormous break from tradition: NASA is out of the business of putting people into low-earth orbit, and doesn't see getting back in to it.

The Agency now sees its role as doing interesting things with people once they get there, hence its emphasis on in-orbit construction, heavy lift capabilities, and resource harvesting hardware. Given budgetary constraints and the real issues with the Constellation program, none of that is necessarily unreasonable.

But it's also a frightening step into the unknown. The commercial companies that NASA will be relying on haven't yet launched any crew-capable hardware. The heavy lift and orbital assembly technology will be developed without a sweeping vision to support it ("Maybe we'll go to an asteroid at some point" really doesn't cut it in the vision department). It's a program that may make a lot of sense, but it's not a program that will inspire until some of the details get filled in.